Manage Your Community – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Create Initial Content for Your Community, we discussed how to adapt your policies to your ever changing community, a part of our community building checklist.

In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss how to manage your initial content.



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Manage Your Community

  • Read the community management experts’ blogs:
    • Amber Naslund’s Brass Tack Thinking[1]
    • Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist[2]
    • Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings[3]
    • Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks, in particular her series “Community Implementation Strategic Plan”[4]
    • Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings[5]
    • Ken Burbery’s Web Business[6]
  • Assign a community manager to:
    • Review all activity
    • Answer questions
    • Stimulate conversation and connection
    • Approve posts (if required)
    • Manage the growth
      • If community grows too fast, members may lose sense of connection
      • If commentary gets too noisy, or too fractious, members may disengage
  • Be responsive
    • The community will expect you to respond to issues they bring up
    • Moderators should participate in the community
    • Use moderation lightly
    • Remember, it’s the members’ community
  • Encourage self-policing
  • Allow off-topic posting — they’re still engaged!
  • Model the behavior you’d like to see
  • Contact rogue members privately; Confronting publicly may be counterproductive
  • Ensure everyone knows the troll policy and other community policies

Manage Your Community is the 168th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 412. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

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[1] Amber Naslund’s Brass Tack Thinking: bit.ly/aI4Ne6

[2] Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist: http://bit.ly/cdX83j

[3] Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings: bit.ly/bNWsZz

[4] Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks: bit.ly/dxDWY0 and bit.ly/aemsl0

[5] Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings: bit.ly/9VbRJx

[6] Ken Burbery’s Web Business: bit.ly/cTb6X9

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